SPECIAL SESSION: Waste of Time, Waste of Money

Gov. John Hickenlooper should ignore those calling for a special legislative session this year unless he wants to look foolish and waste a whole lot of taxpayer money. And folks pressuring the Governor should slow their roll.

We get it, Speaker Dickey-Lee Hullinghorst is bummed that she didn’t get to jam through a bill exempting the hospital provider fee from the state’s TABOR revenue cap. However, calling a special session isn’t going to change that outcome.

Senate President Bill Cadman gave the bill a fair shot, assigning it to the Senate Finance Committee, which is where it should have gone, and that is where it died. Sometimes leadership can play games with a bill, sending it to a committee where it has a better shot of passing or being killed, and he didn’t do that.
The truth of the matter is also this: the majority of Senate Republicans (who control the upper chamber for those who haven’t been paying attention) don’t like the bill. Period. End of story.

That’s politics, folks. The minority party doesn’t get to pass something that the majority party doesn’t support. That’s exactly why construction defects reform also went nowhere this year. So unless the makeup of the legislature is going to change between now and any special session (which it won’t), let’s not waste the time or the money. On average a special session costs $24,000 per day.

Plus, if the state is in such a dire economic situation that we need to pillage the HPF to survive, last thing we need to spend money on is a special session where the outcome will be the same. Maybe the Governor should look at firing state employees starting with his staff.